A not-so-noteworthy retrospective

Armleder produces work you would typically find scrawled on Post-it notes and in the margins of notebooks

Swiss artist John Armleder has made a long career of producing what many would regard as ephemera.

Once a member of Fluxus, that artistic movement of the 1960s and 1970s that, like Dada before it, celebrated the disposable and the accidental, Armleder delights in producing work you would typically find scrawled on Post-it notes and in the margins of notebooks.

Spanning 45 years, this exhibition constitutes a retrospective. Yet it is neither chronological nor thematic in organisation.

Hung in a crowded salon style against a backdrop of crystal snowdrop-printed wallpaper, everything comes to you in a muddlesome rush: a chaos of loose doodles, scrappy collages, overworked repetitive patterns (like something an obsessive teenager might produce) and the neat geometry of bright, intersecting forms.

In particular, there are recurring primary-coloured motifs that resemble those of the Russian supremacists, particularly the soaring forms of their chief practitioner, Kasimir Malevich, although Armleder tirelessly references many other artists.

This exhibition would no doubt give great pleasure to the art nerd, the kind who gets a kick out of recognising the style of particular artists or movements. But since there is little else here to get excited by, there is also something inherently inert about all this fatuous game-playing.